NY State Senate Democrats To Reunite In Effort To Form Majority

NEW YORK, NY — The New York State Senate's breakaway Democrats will rejoin their mainline colleagues in an effort to secure the party's control of the chamber, officials announced Wednesday. Gov. Andrew Cuomo reportedly brokered a deal between Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic minority leader, and Sen. Jeff Klein, leader of the rogue Independent Democratic Conference, to reunify the fractured party after seven years.

The eight-member IDC has allied itself with Senate Republicans since 2011 to give the GOP control of the chamber and endow its own members with power and influence. Democrats nominally held a majority of state Senate seats until this year, when two of the party's senators left for other offices, but remained the minority party largely because of the IDC.

Under the new deal, the IDC will dissolve and its eight members will rejoin the mainline Democratic Conference. Stewart-Cousins will remain the party's leader and Klein — a Bronx senator who is accused of forcibly kissing a staffer three years ago — will be her deputy.

"This is the start of a unified Democratic Conference," Klein said at a Wednesday news conference at Cuomo's Manhattan office.

The reunification will give the Democratic Conference 29 members, still not enough to immediately form a majority. To take control from the GOP, Democrats must win the April 24 special elections to replace former Sens. George Latimer and Ruben Diaz Sr. and also get Sen. Simcha Felder, a Brooklyn Democrat who caucuses with Republicans, to rejoin their conference.

If Democrats can eventually form a ruling Senate majority, they would have total control of the state government's executive and legislative branches. Cuomo is a Democrat and the party holds a firm majority in the state Assembly.

Several IDC members face primary challenges from the left this year. Seven candidates running against them — Jessica Ramos, Robert Jackson, Alessandra Biaggi, Rachel May, Jasmine Robinson, Zellnor Myrie and John Duane — said they would not yield, arguing the sitting senators failed to protect Democratic priorities in the just-passed state budget.

"You failed to represent Democratic priorities at the negotiating table, and no Albany deal should or will prevent a competitive, healthy primary in which New Yorkers strongly consider your allegiance with the Republicans," the candidates wrote in a joint letter to the IDC senators.

As part of the unity deal, no sitting Democratic senator will support any primary challenge against another senator, Cuomo said. The IDC will spend its own political funds to defend its now-former members in primaries before supporting Democrats in the November general elections, in which every Senate and Assembly seat is up for grabs, Klein said.

Cuomo reportedly brokered the reuinificaiton after much criticism from progressives, who say he's enabled IDC's alliance with Republicans and done little to help Democrats win back the Senate.

Cynthia Nixon, the actress who's mounted a primary challenge against Cuomo, is among those who have launched such attacks. She took credit for pushing Cuomo to reunify the Democrats after, in her view, breaking a promise to do so in 2014.

"If you’ve set your own house on fire and watched it burn for eight years, finally turning on a hose doesn’t make you a hero," Nixon said in a statement Wednesday.

Even Scott Reif, a spokesman for the Senate Republicans, said Cuomo only pushed for reunification because he is "scared to death of Cynthia Nixon."

Reif called Wednesday's deal "a desperate attempt to avoid Democratic Party primaries," saying voters supported the GOP-IDC coalition's efforts to get results by working across the aisle.

"With important work still to do and only a handful of session days remaining, we expect to govern the Senate responsibly as the Majority for the rest of the year," Reif said in a statement. "The other option, which nobody wants, is state government descends into chaos and dysfunction."

But Cuomo said the deal was motivated not by Nixon's challenge, but by the "exigent circumstances" of the Republican federal government's hostility toward deep-blue New York and the coming 2018 elections, which he said present a unique opportunity for Democrats to make gains amid piqued interest among the party's voters.

"I think New Yorkers are outraged at what this federal government is doing and I think having Democrats control the Senate is much easier said than done," Cuomo said.

(Lead image: The New York State Capitol is pictured in Albany. Photo by Vincent K Ho/Shutterstock)